By the time Justice ends, Young has actually done what he was falsely accused of at the beginning. He murdered or tried to murder one of his crew, because he was too much of an obstacle to his command. If the first half of Justice left us with the comfortable feeling that clearly Colonel Young was being framed, by its end, Young does what he was accused of to the man who framed him. Anyone who sat back in their easy chair even after Young brutally beat Rush and Rush bared his teeth and charged at him with a rock, certain that seconds after Young stepped in, the suspense would be broken with Rush’s appearance, was disabused of that.

Naturally Rush isn’t gone. The alien spaceship conveniently located on the planet will no doubt catch up to Destiny with Rush at the helm. But it is a game changing moment, more daring than anything that the vaunted Battlestar Galactica had done in a while. It also marks a real break with the previous Stargate shows and places the series closer to the edge of 24. It isn’t of course what Colonel O’Neil would have done, but the writers and producers of Stargate Universe seem determined to take the series to a place where survival is more important than the properly timed wisecrack. And they seem to be succeeding.

But more than that is the changing nature of the theater itself. Broadway is aimed squarely at tourists with Disney productions, Mamma Mia and the few revivals there tend to be celebrity centered. Whatever nostalgia plays on Broadway now, is Baby Boomer nostalgia with productions like Grease. Neil Simon’s productions weren’t neon lit rock and roll extravaganzas, but the theatrical equivalent of the sitcom. A way for families to sit and laugh at mirror images of themselves on stage. But the television family sitcom isn’t doing too well, and the kind of working class audiences that might have wanted that sort of thing, are getting it from Tyler Perry at the movie theater, and not on Broadway.

Broadway does not cater to New Yorkers and Off Broadway is more about drawing in hip audiences looking to watch something trendy. The Avenue Q audience does not have much overlap with Neil Simon, except that they’re often the grandchildren of his original audiences. And Japanese and Minnesota tourists visiting New York don’t come here to see Neil Simon. They don’t even know who Neil Simon is. That is not to say that Neil Simon’s twilight is a great loss. His plays were closest to sitcoms, but they did make a time when theater meant performances aimed at the public, rather than at the tourist trade and the gentrified boroughs. But go ask London about that.

Let’s take another look at the e-book and split it down between technical reading (textbooks, reference material) and recreational reading (generally, but not always fiction). Recreational reading is a form of recreation, it’s not task oriented. One of the reasons people read is to relax, and reading a book on an appliance is just not relaxing. A paperback sends a comforting relaxing message that you’re on break, but there are no breaks when you’re reading mobile. You’re switching from one task to another. And that’s even without addressing the eyestrain issues. Recreational reading is about escaping into a book in a way that no mobile device can accommodate. It’s a way of briefly or at great length taking yourself off the clock.

Proponents of e-books point to the space savings, but most people can hardly manage to finish a single book on one trip. And most people don’t begin one book until they finish the previous one. Who cares if a reader can accommodate 2000 books, if you only need one? A reader might make sense if you’re going to be stranded on a desert island with a charging unit and a nuclear power plant, but for most people reading at home or on the way to work or in the park, a reader is an expensive toy, and reading an e-book through a mobile device is an uncomfortable experience that isn’t useful at all.

So now we come to task based reading, research, reference material and so on. The e-book would seem to be perfect for it, except there’s one medium that is even more perfect, the internet itself. There are still plenty of books that can’t be looked up on Google Books or substituted for with a detailed search, but that’s a matter of time and rights. The way people learn and use information has been switching over to a general track, which focuses more on multitasking, synthesis and non-linear searches, and less on reading page to page and cover to cover, what someone else thinks you should be reading. The nature of the internet has trained two generations to learn and think differently, and trying to tack e-books, which are still basically linear onto that track, is like trying to sell a 2D pixel based game to people who are used to first person shooters. Yes there’s a market for it, but I wouldn’t count on it getting that much bigger.

To sum up, recreational reading will not be bypassed by digital books for some time, if ever. And task based reading is evolving to be far less compatible with e-books and more focused on wading through large and diverse streams of information. Libraries not books is the key here. There is no e-book future. In a few years, the e-book might be to the future, what the flying car and the nutrient meal in a pill was to the future. A fanciful idea at odds with how people actually use technology.

There is certainly a great deal of power discrepancy between Tiger Woods and Hope Witsel, but both show how fragile privacy is, how quickly it can be shattered and how eager a morality mob and the media can be to take advantage of that breach. The same bullying cruelty that caused Hope Witsel’s classmates to taunt her as a slut and recirculate her photo can be seen in the eagerness of the media to serve and consume salacious details about Tiger Woods’ life, such as his private answering messages.

There is no “newsworthy” aspect to any of this coverage. Tiger Woods never courted any kind of publicity in his personal life and the coverage has nothing to do with the only newsworthy thing about him, which is that he’s a good golfer. Aside from the endorsement deals, which are virtually mandatory in sports, Woods never tried to be a celebrity in the conventional sense. But being a private person isn’t enough, once a hole opens up that can then be exploited. And whether it’s Tiger Woods’ personal family argument or Hope Witsel in a moment of poor judgment sending out a photo of herself, the commodification of private pain for public glee and humiliation is all around us.

The adults who bemoan what happened to Hope Witsel are the same ones who participate and consume the content of the same media circus. How exactly were Hope Witsel’s classmates supposed to know that what they were doing was wrong, when David Letterman and Jay Leno do it every week? Like the ending of Lord of the Flies, in which the children are rescued from their savagery by the higher more sophisticated savagery of the adult war machine.

The first problem with that desire is that Sven Tveskoeg, the main character of Death’s Head is serving the futuristic space SS, which leads you to wonder why anyone would want him to succeed. Then there’s the sheer ridiculousness of the structure of Death’s Head, most of which involves Sven Tveskoeg being thrust into a conflict and then finding a way through his usual “Ruthless Killing is the Only Approach” to destroy the opposition. Not only is this sort of thing repetitive, but it doesn’t exactly jibe with a man who at the beginning of the novel was locked in a box and whipped every day.

Naturally Sven Tveskoeg has superpowers, which only increase once he eats some sort of psychic slug. And to his credit, Gunn does keep ranking out the ridiculous gadgets, complete with an intelligent talking gun. But like virtually all military SciFi, Death’s Head features a type of warfare rooted in Vietnam, that depends on grunts, landing craft and rockets aimed at aircraft. It’s a form of warfare that isn’t even all that relevant in the 21st century with men sitting in air conditioned offices controlling drones thousands of miles away. And Gunn fails to provide a good reason why this sort of backward technology is the default mode.

But Death’s Head’s real problem is that it’s a novel of cliches that doesn’t seem to know it. Gunn polishes them and the narrative up just enough to make the contrast obvious. Gunn could do better than this, but he hasn’t chosen to. And instead what we get is a novel that isn’t good enough to be Science Fiction but takes itself too seriously to be McCade Works for the Space Nazis. And as a result ends up lost amidst the genres.

Right now The Fourth Kind has dropped to sixth place in only its second week of release and has a gross over 20 million dollars. With the DVD sales and foreign grosses taken into account, the movie probably won’t lose money, but neither will it be a success story? Why. There’s the Highlander theory, there can only be one viral critical darling passing itself off as a chronicle of real events, and this year that was Paranormal Activity. The Fourth Kind released later only looked like a bad copycat.

Then there’s the independence factor. The Fourth Kind was made by a buddy of Joe Carnahan and starred people who are not exactly obscure like Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton. By Hollywood standards that might be considered indy, but by audience standards, it made The Fourth Kind into just another Hollywood project, even if it was ranked a bit lower on the old totem pole. What it amounted to was Hollywood actors recreating imaginary scenes and announcing that they are recreating them. Which basically made The Fourth Kind into a much worse version of America’s Most Wanted, if AMW was dedicated to chasing aliens, instead of criminals.

Finally, and this is the slightly odd part, The Fourth Kind managed to piss off most of Alaska, which apparently decided that being portrayed as a bunch of hicks who keep being abducted by UFO’s was not good for tourism. After several lawsuits, The Fourth Kind’s production would up settling with a few Alaskan media outlets, everyone knew that the movie was a fraud.

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